Washing the Dead

Unlike everything recommended so far, giving ghusl to a deceased Muslim, a mayyit or a mayyitah, is not merely sunnah but farḍ kifāyah — an obligation upon the community as a whole, though not upon every individual within it personally. There is the account of an advertisement once seen in a newspaper, while still a student, offering very good money indeed for work that turned out, on enquiry, to involve preparing the bodies of the deceased at a local morgue: applying make-up to the body, dressing it, an entire team of made-up artists and the rest of it involved, presenting the deceased as though being readied to appear on a television programme, the body then displayed with its face uncovered for others to come and view. On seeing exactly what the work actually involved, the only possible response was to turn around and walk straight back out, whatever the pay on offer, however much money was involved; no such practice exists anywhere within Islam, and none of it is wanted.

Islam instead requires that the deceased Muslim be washed properly, wrapped in unstitched cloth of a natural fibre such as cotton, and returned to the earth through a simple, entirely natural process — the biological body decomposing back into the very ground it came from, the rūḥ, the soul, being an altogether different matter, not the biological body at all. There is no coffin in any of this, no plastic bag or wrapping of any kind, none of the embalming practised on mummies in ancient Egypt; none of it belongs to this religion in any way. Washing the body in this proper way is farḍ kifāyah upon the Muslim community as a body, a group obligation: where it is neglected, and a Muslim is buried in the sand or the earth without this washing having been properly done, the sin of that neglect falls upon the whole community together, for having failed in it.